Safer That Way
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: Albus Dumbledore is a headmaster, not a politician, so 'of course' he can't be 'evil'...  Warning! Parody.  He's-not-a-politician-so-he-can't-be-evil! Dumbledore.    Alternate Universe.  One-shot.


Disclaimer: I am not J K Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

Note: There are so many _evil_ Dumbledore protrayals around I thought I would give one a go. Except, of course, this _isn't_ evil Dumbledore. I mean if he were _evil_ he'd be a politician, like Fudge, not a _headmaster_.

Warning! Dumbledore parody!

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><p>The screams of the damned rang like music in the headmaster's ears. The Weasley twins had been caught ogling Professor Sinistra through a telescope, and she had given them a detention, stripped to the waist, cleaning Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. Albus wished his Astronomy professor had delegated the matter to him. Granted the boys had been caught breaking curfew when they were engaged in their activities, but they were Gryffindors, and the only rule which it was important for Gryffindors to observe was 'the headmaster is always right'. And the headmaster was certain that there couldn't be much harm in using a telescope to ogle members of the <em>opposite<em> sex. Now granted if they had been ogling _him_ that would have been a bit embarrassing, because it was entirely inappropriate for pupils to engage in _that_ sort of activity with teachers…

Albus Dumbledore knew, however, that the boys would learn from their punishment, that most important lesson of all – that Gryffindors Must Not Get Caught. How could they grow up to become members of his next secret resistance movement if they lacked the subtlety of a bull in a china shop? That they must throw their lives away because the headmaster said so was a given, but it helped if they were able to actually get close to their targets _before_ going out in a blaze of glory.

But whilst it was all good clean fun, for Albus Dumbledore, as he paced through the corridors of Hogwarts, to listen to the soothing noises of Gred and Forge learning their lesson, and learning it well, he had a good many things on his mind. Such as that the manufacturers of the chocolate frog company were refusing to pay him his royalties for featuring him on their latest set of collector cards. Now Albus had a good deal of patience, usually, for confectionary manufacturers, but the last batch of lemon drops they'd sent him had not been dosed with the regular amounts of veritaserum, and three dozen pupils had gotten away with minor peccadilloes, until Albus had realised what was going on and resorted to legilimency. Albus preferred to use legilimency as a last resort, because it always resulted in a rise in pupils dropping by the infirmary for aspirins to treat their headaches, and aspirins were _expensive_ in the wizarding world. And they were even more so, when compared to the price of veritaserum laced lemon drops supplied on a complimentary basis by the head of a major sweet manufacturer because Albus had seven years worth of blackmail material on every board member from their own times at Hogwarts. Well, Albus had trained attack-dog options, too, but Moody had lost a leg the last time he sent him out on an 'arm-twisting' mission – contrary to popular opinion which held the injury had been sustained fighting Death Eaters, Moody had in fact lost his leg when he slipped whilst chasing an executive down a manufacturing line, and fallen into a troll-powered vat that was squashing blueberries for jelly-beans. There had been some very interesting sweet selections produced the next few months, in consequence, suffice it to say, but Moody wasn't so useful for hounding people over the shop floor these days. Not that that wasn't to say that Moody wasn't still prepared to do whatever Albus wanted in an emergency – given the tough auror's rather surprising choice of underwear, he didn't exactly have much say in the matter. Albus considered most Death Eaters to be incompetents and idiots, because they used the Imperius curse to make people do what they wanted instead of blackmail. It was considerably easier to throw off an Imperius curse than to deal with compromising letters and photographs stored in a Gringotts high-security vault in a different country.

Anyway, Albus was annoyed by the lack of royalties for the latest chocolate frog cards which featured him, although to be honest if they _hadn't_ featured him on their cards, there would have been an 'accidental fire' at some point whilst a group of students were fighting a former Death Eater on company property. The less sophisticated would have called Albus' relationship with certain companies a protection racket. Albus regarded it as the cost of doing business and maintaining one's reputation. It wasn't as if he needed the gold – well actually he _did_ as despite having embezzled almost the entire contents of the vaults of the Gaunts, the Weasleys, the Potters and the Blacks all years ago, and hardly ever having spent a knut of it, he considered that there was no such thing as 'enough' gold – but anyway, maybe he _should_ send Alastor round for a 'friendly word' after all.

The school finances, meanwhile, were a mess, as always. Millicent Bagnold had unfortunately finally managed to work out that Albus was creaming off money from the school budget, like crazy, to line his own pockets, and to fund those of his schemes which were actually _nearly_ legal (unlike the vast majority), and had accordingly cut the school budget massively. Bagnold was gone now – Albus had seen to that – but unfortunately her replacement, Fudge, was in Malfoy's pocket, as Albus couldn't be bothered to spend the gold to buy Fudge for himself, so the school budget had stayed frozen. There was barely enough left over, once the cost of essentials such as his wardrobe costs had been met, to pay for luxuries such as teacher salaries or new brooms. Fortunately, Albus had caught on to a rather brilliant idea in recent years of making the curse on the defence against the dark arts position work for him. Every year he would insure the new teacher, with a different muggle insurance company, and wait for whatever was going to happen to do so, so he could collect a fat cheque. It was like betting on the Chudley Cannons finishing in the bottom three of the Quidditch league, another reliable way he had found to make money – although he did occasionally find the need to arrange an 'accident' to befall a critical member of the Cannons if they looked to be doing too well. And another scheme, of course, was Sybill Trelawney. He told everyone else she was a teacher because she had made that prophecy in 1980 about the one who would defeat the Dark Lord, and he needed to keep her safe. The real reason she was on the Hogwarts payroll and why she hadn't made a genuine prophecy since 1980, was because she was Dumbledore's financial advisor, when it came to playing the world stockmarkets. Her inner eye was too exhausted scanning the listings of top 100 listed companies to have any energy left to focus on _trivial_ unimportant issues such as the potential rise of dark lords. And besides, on the dark-lord front, Albus owned investments in several wand-manufacturers and goblin armaments companies, and a war was _good_ for such business. Every time a civil war broke out in some corner of the wizarding world Albus Dumble – ah-ha – made a killing in financial terms.

But Albus had _some_ standards, and pricks of conscience. He was certain that had he gone into _politics_ he might have turned into an unconscionable wretch, and so he had stuck with a career as a school teacher, where he would not be tempted to try out hare-brained manipulation schemes which might adversely impact the world. Yes, he had gone into teaching, rising in time to become headmaster of Hogwarts, always certain that things would be much safer that way…

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><p>Author Notes:<p>

Since Harry Potter does not figure in this parody, it's probably date for the 1989-1990 or the 1990-1991 school year, based on the presence of the Weasley twins, and assuming it's set in a universe which even remotely approximates to canon. I'd probably place it in the 1990-1991 school year, since Fudge has recently replaced Bagnold as Minister for Magic, and the annual school budget has been distributed at least once since the changeover.


End file.
